Woodstock 1969: The Mudstock Experience

On August 15, 1969, the Woodstock Festival began. It's become arguably the most iconic rock gathering in history. In 2009. Classic Rock celebrated its 40th anniversary

“All the stuff that the counter-culture had accomplished, the anti-war movement, Woodstock... I mean, this was a massive decade, man.

“My
teenage decade. We had been through the
assassinations of Martin Luther King, the Kennedys, the Summer Of
Love, the Chicago convention of 68, the women’s movement, the war
in Vietnam, the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement. The
social upheaval of that decade was extraordinary. Woodstock was
really the culmination and, really, the great celebration of it all,
particularly because we all co-operated so well with each other. I
don’t think it’s been repeated since.”

As
the decades wear on, the Woodstock festival of 1969 becomes less of a
rock concert and more of an emblem, a gold star pressed firmly into
the hippie generation’s forehead; a proud, beaming moment in a
rolling sea of bad trips, bloody protests and war-on-everybody. It
was that one weekend where everything worked out, where it all just
clicked, where free love and cheap drugs and fuzzy rock’n’roll
was quite obviously the answer to all of life’s problems. It was
the calm eye in the world-thrashing storm that was the 1960s. When
Sha Na Na drummer John ‘Jocko’ Marcellino parked the band’s
rickety van on the vast green field of Max Yasgur’s farm in upstate
New York on that fateful Friday afternoon in August 1969, he had no
idea that by the time the weekend was through, his fate would be
sealed. That 40 years later, he’d still be chatting about that one
35-minute appearance the band made that ultimately launched his
career and sent millions on their own journey of discovery.

“We
were wandering around, trying to figure out what to do next,”

Marcellino
says, recalling the summer of 1969. “We had done our thing playing
campuses, and we had been in New York for the summer to see if we
could make it. It was my first summer away, my Freshman year at
Columbia. We were hanging out and trying to figure out where to play
with this campy 12-man act.”

Sha
Na Na started life in the late 1960s as the Kingsmen, an a cappella
group made up of Columbia University students. When Louie
Louie became a smash hit for the
Northwest Kingsmen, Marcellino’s band changed their name and their
image. They dressed in gold lamé or jeans and tight T-shirts and
sang early rock’n’roll standards – stuff like At the Hop and
Blue Moon, the first batch of ‘golden oldies’. Much to their
surprise, the show – highly synchronised,
theatrical and gently mocking – became an instant hirt and they
packed rooms all over New York. In July 1969, Sha Na Na played a run
of shows at Steve Paul’s the Scene, an
infamous Manhattan rock club that had become the hot hangout for
visiting 60s superstars like Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix.

“We’re
down there playing, it’s our third week together, and there’s
people lining around the block to see us, industry people that came
to check us out. That’s’ where I met John Bonham, Hendrix,
Joplin... Here I was, this 19-year-old kid, and I’m wigging out
because there’s all these rock gods coming out to see us play.”

On
the final night of Sha Na Na’s run, Woodstock promoters Michael
Lang and Artie Kornfeld were in the audience.

“The
floor manager came over and asked us if we wanted to play Woodstock,
and our manager said: ‘Go over and tell them yes’. I had been
hearing about who was going to be on this bill. I was a teenager in
New York, I’m reading the Village
Voice,

listening
to the FM radio, and everybody is on this bill. So I said: ‘Yes,
absolutely'.
I was thinking of going anyway, and here’s this guy asking if we
wanted to perform. We were the last act added to the bill. We weren’t
even on the poster. I used to joke about how we misunderstood them,
how we thought it was ‘Three days of grease and music’, and when
we got there the place was swarming with hippies.”

Joel
Rosenman is one of the four men responsible for Woodstock and its
half-a-million-strong hippie swarm.Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld
were two savvy concert

promoters
and industry insiders who dreamed up the idea of building a
state-of-the art recording studio in sleepy Woodstock, New York, and
brought the proposal to entrepreneur Rosenman and his partner, John
Roberts. They had the contacts, the know-how and the vision to turn
this tiny town into a virtual Mecca for artists and performers. All
they needed was the money. Rosenman’s solution was to put on a
show.

“The
notion we had was to make enough money from this festival to build
this studio we had planned on this land we’d secured in Woodstock.
We figured we’ll put on the show, throw the profits into the
studio, no sweat.”

What
followed was the folly and misadventure of a lifetime.

“To
call Woodstock a financial disaster would be putting it lightly,”
Rosenman laughs. “If you multiply all the red ink with the cost of
inflation over the years, it probably lost about 10 million dollars.”

It's
an age-old tale at this point, but to recap: the
town of Woodstock balked, forcing
Rosenman and company to wheel their wobbly festival further down the
road, to a town called Bethel, where they met a friendly farmer named
Max Yasgur. He offered his vast, rolling fields to the young men, who
quickly filled it up with 500,000 of their closest friends. An
intense young filmmaker named Michael Wadleigh, armed with an army of
cameramen (including Martin Scorsese) and many miles of celluloid,
joined the party, filming performers and audience alike.

The
show lasted from Friday August 15, 1969, until the morning of Monday
August 18, and featured the likes of Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Janis
Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Sly And The
Family Stone, Jefferson Airplane, Joe Cocker... Crosby, Stills, Nash
& Young played their second-ever gig at Woodstock; John Sebastian
wore tie-dyed everything and performed stoned off his tits; She Na Na
taunted the crowd, telling the “fucking hippies” to get haircuts.
The entire weekend was marred by downpours of rain, which turned the
festival grounds into a miserable bowl of mud.

In
the chaos leading up to the festival, the promoters failed to employ
enough ticket takers, so the kids eventually just tore down fences
and poured in for free. The resultant overflow of flower-power turned
the field into a disaster area and caused financial ruin for the
promoters. The highway was shut down, bands were forced to get in and
out via helicopter, and the army, local police and neighbours all
chipped in to try and keep half-a-million kids fed and safe.

Amazingly,
just about everyone survived. When it was all over, Rosenman was
broke. But he was a broke hero. The kids at Woodstock gave peace a
chance, and it worked. Many decades later, everybody’s still trying
to figure out how.

“It’s
an enigma we’ve been trying to crack for 40 years,” says
Rosenman. “Kids like mud. That’s all we really know.”

“God,
the mud,” Jocko recalls. “Initially we were supposed to play on
Saturday night, but then there was a rain delay, and there were all
these acts coming in from other places. We kept going back and they
kept telling us: ‘No, you’re not on yet. Maybe you can get on on
Sunday’.

Eddie
Kramer, Jimi Hendrix’s recording engineer and later Zeppelin’s
(who would go on to great fame as a heavy metal record producer in
the 1980s), was

at
Woodstock to record Hendrix’s set. He, too, remembers the wildly
adversarial conditions of the weekend : “I was surprised, given the
circumstances, how many great performances we were able to capture. I
mean, it was rough out there. I like to use the phrase: ‘Three days
of drugs and Hell’. It was a battlefield. We were wet, sleeping on
the floor of the truck. We had no communication with the stage. It
was just a case of put the faders up and hope for the best.”

“It
was Monday morning, and they finally told us to come on back,” says
Jocko. “Believe me, we had no special place to go. There was no way
to leave. We were sleeping in the van, we were sleeping on the
ground, under the trees. Like everyone else, I don’t actually
remember most of it. I did spend some of the weekend ingesting a
hallucinogen that was probably not FDA-approved.

“There
it was, Monday morning, and then all of a sudden the Band Of Gypsies
starts** getting
ready. We were like: **‘Damn,
we’ve been out here all weekend and we’re not going to get to
play',
because we knew Hendrix was closing. But it was great that Hendrix
demanded to close, because the camera crew was still there. They were
exhausted, but they were there. And so they finally said: ‘Go
play’, and they gave us a half-hour or 35 minutes, and we got up
there and they filmed it.”

Much
in the way Woodstock reinvented the 1960s for an entire generation,
Sha Na Na did the same for the 50s. After their 90-second burst of At
The Hop in the Woodstock movie, they
became superstars. They spent five years touring the country, then
landed their own syndicated TV show, which ran for eight solid years
all around the world. In 1978 they appeared in Grease,
the wildly popular film adaptation of the rock’n’roll revival
musical. Sha Na Na’s cock-eyed view of the 1950s as a Shangri-la of
gum- snapping Betties and crooning greasers became the industry
standard, from HappyDays
to the Stray Cats. Even today, the ‘1950’ that most people
imagine is largely the alternative universe that Sha Na Na created
amid protests and rallies on the campus of Columbia University in
1969.

“People
say: ‘What is Woodstock to Sha Na Na?’. And I say: ‘Everything’,
Jocko laughs. “We were a local college band, we had fun with it,
but we were about to pack it up. I mean, what do you do with this
campy thing? And then we play Woodstock and we’re internationally
known. Then we get a record deal, we have a great five-year run
underground playing colleges and the Fillmores (clubs
on the East and West coasts), and then
we got a TV show that played eight years worldwide, and in the middle
of that we did Grease.
And it all went back to this one show.”

Sha
Na Na still play dozens of shows a year. As with any facet of
nostalgia, memories of Woodstock have become a lucrative commercial
enterprise
over the years. Just recently a stunning Woodstock DVD box set, which
includes a four-hour director’s cut of the documentary, hit the
shelves. There’s a state-of-the-art museum in Bethel. A line of
Woodstock-inspired beach ware is in department stores all over the
US. Joel Rosenman has even attempted, over the years, to replicate
the festival in the same swampy field, with a so-so 94 edition,
remembered mostly for Green Day’s mud-slinging antics and the Red
Hot Chili Peppers’ lightbulb helmets, and the disastrous Woodstock
99 festival, a show marred by violence, arson, rape, and
price-gouging of greedy vendors. Undaunted, Rosenman still sees a
bright future for Woodstock.

“There’s
always going to be the next party,” he says. “It won’t be the
same

as
the last one, obviously, but there’s always a new one to look
forward to. There’s the opportunity now to reach 100 million people
all at the same time, to deliver music or information or mosquito
nets or whatever. To do something where we’re able to mix a live
event that can reach people in remote areas, and to do some good at
the same time, that’s our next event.”

After
the rampant criminality of the 99 fest, does Rosenman still see a
glimmer of the original Woodstock in this generation?

“Yes,
of course,” he says. “It wasn’t just about 1969. In everyone
you meet there’s a little of that spark of humanity and community
that we had at Woodstock. It happened out of adversity there. People
were under stress, and in that environment people can get
mean-spirited or it can be beautiful. At the original Woodstock it
was beautiful. Society had fallen apart on Friday, and by Saturday
the audience had built it up again. And they built a better one.”